Swarm of Ideas

What happens when you ask 300 people to present their ideas for a little computer program to make their lives easier. You get many interesting ideas, some good, some wacky.

Ths is my first experience experimenting with the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The first time I'd heard of it was the Sheep Market story. In a way, its like this great resource waiting for a problem to be solved.

I am making the list available here. I've just converted it into an XML file and use an XSLT to have your web browser auto-magically transform it into HTML for easy viewing.

Code

I converted the CSV data from the mechanical turk with some quick and dirty code. The heavy lifting of parsing the CSV file is accomplished using the Jakarta Commons CSV library.

Whenever I get around to rewriting it, I'll convert line-breaks to breaks and escape XML/HTML elements as needed.

Comments

In the meantime, feel free to leave comments on the blog.



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